View full sizeThomas Boyd/ The OregonianDurham Elementary in Tigard is among the schools identified as having inadequate performance under the No Child Left Behind law last year. Oregon won permission to use a different method to judge schools starting next month. A school like Durham, that had acceptable overall scores but limited success with limited English students in math, would likely rate satisfactory under the new system.

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Oregon won federal approval Wednesday for its plan to judge schools differently -- and mete out different consequences to the lowest performers -- than has been required under the No Child Left Behind law.

That means the state's nearly 1,300 public schools will be graded in an entirely new way next month when the state reports how they performed last school year. And it adds certainty that the state will require all teachers and principals to be evaluated in part by their students' test score gains beginning in 2013-14.

Ben Cannon, education adviser to Gov. John Kitzhaber, said the development will give Oregonians more control of their schools and lead to better results. "We'll be using a tailored approach to schools in Oregon based on the actual challenges they are facing in this state," he said.

With the feds' OK Wednesday, that approach is dead -- to the relief of many educators who thought it was overly simplistic and punitive.

Highlights of Oregon's new system

Ratings:

Schools will get one of five labels -- model, strong, satisfactory, focus or priority.

Gains and graduation:

Schools will be judged on reading and math scores, students' year-to-year gains in reading and math, and the performance of special education, minority, low-income and limited-English students as one big group. Half of high schools' rating will be based on their graduation rate.

Consequences:

Low-performing schools won't have to offer transfers or tutoring anymore. Schools that receive federal funds to help disadvantaged students will get lots of time and expert help to design and implement customized improvement plans. As before, poor performing schools that don't receive that federal money escape consequences.

Noting excellence

: Schools with exceptional results will be labeled "models" and will be asked to share techniques.

Next step

: Oregon's approval is conditional, not guaranteed. Next year, state officials will have to set and win federal approval of specific plans to evaluate teachers based on student test scores.

Now schools will be judged on a combination of factors -- including how historically low-scoring student groups, combined, score on reading and math exams. That will allow schools to post abysmal outcomes for one or more groups but still rate satisfactory.

Those judged inadequate won't have to offer tutoring or transfers but can instead spend their federal funding on whatever customized improvement plan the school and the state agree on.

Also gone: The state won't single out only poor-performing schools. It will name "model schools" -- those with the highest test scores, biggest year-to-year gains, strong performance across student groups and, for high schools, best graduation rates.

Those schools could be paid by low-achieving schools for tips and coaching. They're also likely to be praised by the governor, asked to give presentations at conferences, and otherwise treated like educational superstars, state officials say.

About 20 schools are expected to be designated next month as "priority schools" because of rock-bottom reading and math achievement plus other problems, such as weak student growth or high dropout rates. An additional 75 schools or so are projected to be labeled "focus" schools for low overall achievement plus failure to make gains with particular groups of students.

By contrast, if No Child Left Behind rules had remained in place, more than 250 Oregon schools were projected to be labeled inadequate next month and required to offer transfers or tutoring in the coming year.

The priority schools will get hands-on, prescriptive help from the state to probe underlying problems, and then design and implement a plan to get better results. Focus schools will have more freedom to explore and fix problems on their own, with the ability to ask for state help.

"Conditional" approval

Oregon applied earlier than most states for a No Child Left Behind waiver, but 26 other states got a green light before Oregon. The biggest sticking point, Cannon said, was how specific Oregon would have to be with its pledge to make demonstrated student achievement gains a "significant" part of how every principal and teacher is evaluated.

In the end, Oregon agreed that it would do so beginning in 2013-14 -- but won't spell out the specifics until after it has tried a couple of approaches in a few pilot school districts during the coming year.

Oregon's authority to dodge the requirements of No Child Left Behind is thus "conditional," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. State officials must prove to federal officials next year that their plan meets federal standards -- or go back under the old rules.

Two of the six other states that won approval Wednesday, Arizona and Kansas, were also given conditional approval for that reason, Duncan said.

"Oregon has not zeroed in on precisely the measures they are going to put in place" to judge teachers and principals by student results, said Michael Yudin, Duncan's principal deputy assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. "They are going to learn from this next year what are the best models, and we thought that made a lot of sense."

Cannon agreed. "We felt like a responsible approach was to take the additional time to establish a valid way of incorporating student growth into our statewide requirements for teacher and principal evaluation before committing to the feds. It didn't make sense to rush to a conclusion."

"Using strings"

But Hanna Vaandering, vice president of Oregon's teachers union, blasted the Obama administration for forcing Oregon to promise to grade teachers by test scores to keep federal schools money flowing.

"I am extremely disappointed in the feds and their insistence on tying teacher evaluations to standardized tests scores," she told fellow members of the Oregon Education Investment Board, which oversees education from preschool through universities, at a meeting last week. "They are using strings to make us do things that I don't think are good for kids."

She said educators who helped rewrite Oregon's application to gain federal approval made comments along the lines of "'Plug your nose and do it so we can get the money.' Our kids deserve better."

To date, 32 states have won permission to depart from the law, five are waiting to hear and 13 have not sought waivers.

Oregon schools will see another change next year. In its plan, Oregon pledged to come up with yet another way to judge school performance by fall 2013 based on results they achieve in 2012-13.

State leaders want to include more meaningful measurements along with test scores such as absenteeism among kindergartners, how many high school freshmen pass enough classes to be on track to graduate, and the share of high school graduates who go on to college. The new system will be designed on an "aggressive" schedule over the next five months, Cannon said.